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Today’s marketing initiatives must be data-driven, customer-centric and omnichannel. Unfortunately, though, many CMOs seem to be struggling to gain alignment and to build consensus across their lines of business and into the board room. As a result, the C-suite can be plagued with uncertainty and misunderstanding, and CMOs are starting to worry about losing relevance.

What does it take to get us all on the same page, pulling together?

Most companies still have a long way to go. “Outside looking in: the CMO struggles to get in sync with the C-suite,” a new Economist Intelligence Unit report, describes a troubling sense of confusion among the nearly 400 executives surveyed. For example, most of the CMOs polled ranked their top marketing priorities as creating new products/services (22 percent), customer acquisition (20 percent) and driving revenue (19 percent). By contrast, the non-CMOs in the survey said marketing’s top priority should be driving revenue (30 percent) finding new customers (21 percent) and improving the organization’s reputation (18 percent).

And priorities were not the only disconnect highlighted in the report. CMOs and other C-suite executives also disagree on what metrics best track return on marketing investment, whether the company clearly understands customer tastes and needs, who represents the voice of the customer within the organization and which channel is most effective for customer engagement.

Phew! Sometimes it seems the only things C-suiters CAN agree upon is that: 1) Marketing is undergoing transformative change, and 2) Marketing’s renaissance is forcing all of us to re-think the ways we work to build our brands in the age of consumer control.

Of course, by “re-thinking” I don’t mean excluding the CMO. Perhaps most surprising of all, this new report also found that:

Only 17 percent of the CMOs polled see themselves as the leader of customer engagement.

One-fifth of CMOs say they are only consulted on marketing strategy; they don't take the lead. 3 percent report playing no role at all.

What can CMOs do to retain –or regain –relevance in this environment? Other results from this study point the way. The findings show that:

1.Data-driven marketing is critical to driving relevance. When asked to list the barriers that most impede marketing’s ability to deliver more value to the organization, non-CMOs cited marketing’s limited ability to demonstrate return on investment (ROI), difficulties in hiring skilled marketing talent and marketing’s inability to turn data into actionable insights. CMOs cited these top three barriers: hiring and retaining talent, the lack of a strategic role for marketing and a limited ability to demonstrate ROI.

Key Takeaway: CMOs must transform the organization by first, linking spend to results across multiple channels and then improving transparency. In addition, organizational models need to be innovated. Today’s CMOs must lookto hybrid partnership models to augment skills, and consider virtual collaborations to attract talent where it is located vs where the headquarters is located.

2. Most new investments will be focused around technology.Gartner predicts by 2017, the CMO will spend more on IT than CIO. In the EIU survey participants were asked, “In what areas should marketing focus investments in order to contribute most to your business in 3 years?” Their top answers included: customer analytics (41 percent), CRM (38 percent), social media (29 percent), mobile app development (22 percent) and brand advertising (22 percent).

Key Takeaway: Data strategy, data consolidation and channel integration are essential for CMOs and the broader organization to drive better insights through analytics, mobile initiatives and social engagement. CMOs need to partner with IT and Customer Insights to address the data gaps, develop a comprehensive strategy and remove the channel silos that proliferate data and dilute customer engagement.

Key Takeaway: CMOs need to roll up their sleeves and “get dirty.” They need to question the existing tools and systems and focus on consolidating technologies, channels and data. They also need to define processes and determine what analytics are required –for the individual customer view, as well as for overall customer and operational performance analytics.

It’s not too late for CMOs to change the game or the outcome. In fact, this is the perfect time for both CMOs and senior leadership teams to seize the opportunity to tear down silos, integrate processes and increase their commitment to investing in the skills, tools and processes required to become more customer-centric and insight-driven. Now that marketing is the business, CMOs have the opportunity on all fronts to drive change, to be more relevant and to improve alignment across the C-Suite.